434 Special report: Do you understand!

Special report: Do you understand!

PART 3—COMPARED TO WHAT (permalink): Quite appropriately, coverage of Paul Ryan’s budget plan has largely focused on Medicare—on his transformation of the venerable program into a voucher system.

This proposal strikes us as a very bad idea. But even here, we the people manage to get confused about basic facts; sometimes, we’re helped along by our major journalists. Last night and this morning, MSNBC was playing tape of Ryan at a town hall meeting in his home district. In the first exchange on the tape, a young man is shown saying this:

MALE CONSTITUENT (4/26/11): You want to take a publicly administered program such as Medicare and turn it over to a private corporation... [video edit] Tell me how my grandma’s going to benefit from that, please.

RYAN: It’s a fair question.

MSNBC didn’t show Ryan’s answer. We’ll guess he started by asking this man how old his grandmother is. Ryan’s very bad proposal affects no one who is over age 54 at present—and this constituent seemed to be in his twenties.

Grandma might be in line for a voucher from Ryan. But we’ll guess this young man might be better advised to worry about himself—and about his mother and father.

(To judge this constituent’s age for yourself, just click here. The question starts about 1:30 in—after Rachel chuckles and vamps about the tough questions Ryan got, thus helping us learn to adore her.)

Just a guess: Eventually, most people will know that Ryan’s proposal excludes those who are currently 55 or older. In itself, this is part of the proposal’s strangeness; under Ryan’s proposal, a transition period would occur in which one spouse might receive the current version of Medicare while the second spouse got stuck with a voucher. That said, the Ryan and Obama plans are both premised on the need to reduce future budget deficits. And to date, the press corps’ coverage of this seminal matter has been a groaning mess.

As we’ve noted, this mess reveals the pitiful way our journalistic and intellectual culture functions. It’s hard to wrap the mind around how very dumb we actually are as a (floundering) people.

Good lord! By how much would honestbrave Ryan’s plan reduce future budget deficits? If you read the New York Times, there’s an answer to suit every taste! The editors have seemed to say that there would be no deficit reduction over the next ten years. Meanwhile, on the paper’s front page, readers have been told that Ryan’s plan achieves $4.4 trillion in deficit reduction in that ten-year period—while other reports have seemed to suggest that it’s really $1.8 trillion (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/26/11).

Reading the Times on this seminal topic recalls the joke about New England weather: If you don’t like the size of Ryan’s deficit reductions, just wait a while!

By the way: Let’s assume that Ryan’s plan really would produce $4 trillion in deficit reduction. (That’s the amount of deficit reduction Obama seemed to attribute to Ryan’s plan in his own budget speech. Text below.) Tell the truth: Do you have the slightest idea how much new debt would accrue in the next ten years even with that amount of reduction? Put another way: Under current projections, how much new debt will we acquire in the next ten years if nobudget plan gets passed?

It’s always possible that we’ve missed something, although we’ve searched the Nexis archives on several occasions. But in the Washington Post and the New York Times, we have seen no attempt to answer this bone-simple question. On this, our current top political topic, we’re basically flying blind. Our biggest newspapers make little attempt to provide even bone-simple information and analysis. Truly, it’s hard to comprehend the depth of our culture’s intellectual squalor—but that squalor has been with us, largely unnoticed, for a considerable time.

This brings us to something else you don’t understand. Here it is:

When Obama gave his budget speech, he described the amount of deficit reduction which would occur under his plan. Aw heck! Let’s reprint what he said about both major budget proposals:

OBAMA (4/13/11): A serious plan doesn't require us to balance our budget overnight…But it does require tough decisions and support from our leaders in both parties now. Above all, it will require us to choose a vision of the America we want to see five years, ten years, twenty years down the road.

Now to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party's presidential candidates. It's a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

[…]

To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms. We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I'm president, we won't.

So today, I'm proposing a more balanced approach to achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years. It's an approach that borrows from the recommendations of the bipartisan Fiscal Commission that I appointed last year, and it builds on the roughly $1 trillion in deficit reduction I already proposed in my 2012 budget.

Obama wants to reduce deficits by $4 trillion over twelve years. This raises a point we don’t understand, a question we can’t answer:

Four trillion dollars compared to what? To what is Obama comparing his budget proposal when he makes that statement?

We’re baffled by that question. Here’s why:

Normally, budget proposals get compared to what would happen “under current law.” That is, the new proposal gets compared to the level of spending and taxing and debt acquisition which will occur if things proceed as scheduled—if no change in current law occurs.

This procedure can be misleading. Sometimes, “current law” includes assumptions which everyone knows to be bogus. But unless we’re completely deranged, budget proposals of this type are normally “scored” in comparison to what would happen under current law.

Presumably, that isn’t the case when Obama says that his plan would produce $4 trillion in deficit reduction. Unless we’re completely deluded, a great deal of deficit reduction would occur under current law. Unless we’re massively confused, current law calls for the end of the Bush tax rates at the end of next year. If this occurs—if we return to the tax rates of the Clinton era—this would produce a great deal of deficit reduction all by itself.

Could Obama’s relatively modest proposals really produce $4 trillion in deficit reduction as compared to that? We would assume that the answer is no. But here’s the basic problem:

Go ahead! Fire up whatever search engine you like! Search the past month of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Try to find where these mighty newspapers answered a bone-simple question.

Obama has said that his budget plan would reduce deficits by $4 trillion. But go ahead—try to answer this question:

Four trillion dollars compared to what?

We don’t know the answer to that. Our question:

Do you understand?

Tomorrow: Politifact rules